A cafe without a d is like a coffee without the c

At the appropriately named Freemans
Edinburgh

Thank you, lady and dog, for permission

Fire and flowers

Best wishes to Lewis P Morley (get his delightful False Childhood Memory Syndrome), Marilyn Pride, and everyone else who's going through fire stress now, and will over these next months. Australia is a tense place every spring/summer.

This is what our land looks like at the moment. The trees that were black sticks less than a year ago have now grown unsightly 'fur'; but this patch of Xanthorrhoea has now grown up to challenge their heights.

"[We] used to use them [flower stalks] as spears — just playing with them. The old people told us to leave them alone, even when they were green, because we'd make it rain." Jack Hampton
— from Geebungs and Snake Whistles: Koori People and Plants of Wreck Bay, by the Wreck Bay Community and Cath Renwick, first published in 2000 by Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

I highly recommend this fascinating book, not just for locals like me, but for people the world over. Crazily, it is no longer in print in Australia, but is printed in the UK, and available to Australians as an import. Get it.

Artichoke posed

A donkey after a drink

This is a picture of satisfaction. Sometimes the tongue can stay out for minutes, like any other thinker's stick of red licorice.

Of course the beautiful eyes are half-shielded, full of intelligence but giving no secrets away. If, indeed, an interrogator forces the donkey to interrupt thoughts and look directly at the inquisitor, what the i sees is only a big-nosed self-reflection.

21st century capitalism

It could be a sign

but is just a small detail on a washed-up fish — a pectoral fin of the Longhorn Cowfish Lactoria cornuta

Here's the whole fish:

Cowfish are both beautiful and intelligent. Unlike humans, they release ostracitoxin when stressed. Their method of locomotion, limited by the rigidity of body and their lack of pelvic fins, resembles that of a hummingbird crossed with a coracle--they can hover like a hummingbird, their fins moving too fast for the human eye to see, but they can't dart any more than a teacup's saucer. Read about them and see a picture of how they should look—colourful and alive—on the superb MarineBio site, which reveals another fascinating fact about their ability to utter complaints.

Life as a lens

High Noon for a point of punctuation

“I say, the position of the full stop in relation to the closing quote mark depends on—”

“And I say the dang period always goes inside.”

"Whether the reader actually notices the position of the final full stop is rather dubious. Editors shed blood, sweat and tears over the issue, wrestling with anomalies not covered by the various rules; and the wastage of editorial time suggests there’s a lot to be said for a simple system. The American system (put it inside) is still easiest to apply in texts with a lot of dialogue . . . But for nonfiction writing, the practice of treating final punctuation for quote marks the same way as for parentheses has much to recommend it."
- Pam Peters, The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide, Cambridge University Press, 1995

I highly recommend this worldly guide as a reference for writers, editors, and an eye-opening tour of English's Babel, It is much more useful than a provincial tome like the Oxford Guide to or Chicago Manual of Style.

However, Peters would be useless at a shootout. I see her at High Noon sitting on the fence, yelling “Arbitrate!”.

Movement

 

Mushrooms past their peak

Often the older fungi get, the more interesting they are. Others think so too, especially slime moulds.

This fungus is in the genus Ramaria, and here the slime mould looks like rime.

I have no idea what this mushroom is, but it felt like a warm mouse.